Abstract
Dives and Pauper, an early fifteenth-century dialogue between a wealthy layperson and a poor wanderer, is intensely concerned with the ways in which economic activities both tie society together and create imaginary divisions. This chapter situates the author’s analysis of economic and social privilege within the larger context of Franciscan theological and philosophical explorations of ownership and economics. While the ideas in Dives and Pauper contain the potential for radical social change, its author repeatedly stops short of advancing political solutions for his audience. Instead, his focus is on changing his audience’s mental orientation toward his or her social position.
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Notes
- 1.
Barnum’s edition is divided into volume 1, parts 1 and 2, which contain an introduction and the edited text, and volume 2, which contains commentary and explanatory notes. All quotations of the text are taken from volume 1, part 1 of this edition and cited by page and line number.
- 2.
Thomas of Celano (1963, 31).
- 3.
See Dives and Pauper (1976), volume 1, part 1, 317, ll. 17–23 and p. 319, ll. 71; and volume 2, 194, l. 61. See also Dives and Pauper, “Introduction,” 2, xxv; Pfander (1933), 307; Hudson and Spencer (1984), 231; Willmott (1994), 4–5. For more on the role of Franciscans at the University of Oxford, see Courtenay (1992), 1–34.
- 4.
Willmott (1994), 49–54.
- 5.
- 6.
Dives and Pauper has not received the scholarly attention it deserves as a literary text. While it is frequently mentioned in aggregation with other vernacular theological works or as a repository for tidbits about late medieval religious beliefs, almost thirty years separated the publication of volumes one and two of its critical edition. As a result, only a few scholars have examined its literary construction or thematic elements. See, for instance, Tavormina (1994), 271–86; Aers (2004), 157–62; Fitzgibbons (2013), 181–214.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
There is a dense secondary literature surrounding Bonaventure’s innovations and the resulting controversies, which had far-reaching consequences for law and political thought as well as theology. See, in addition to what has been cited already, Lambert (1961), 167–9; Coleman (1988), 607–48; Canning (2011), 107–32; Todeschini (2009), 79–150.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Canning (2011, 118–19) argues that Ockham saw the Franciscan life of poverty as being primary and that he intended his arguments to be fundamentally apolitical, a stance which seems similar to the stance that the Dives-writer is taking in this passage.
- 14.
- 15.
See Kaye (1998) 48–9, 130–46.
- 16.
- 17.
See Kaye (1998), 66–70, 139.
- 18.
Todeschini (2009), 67–68.
- 19.
He is even willing to borrow the arguments of an earlier anti-Franciscan writer, Uthred of Durham , who argued that the evangelical counsels did not forbid owning property but rather forbade loving and relying on property . See Dipple (1994), 251. Pauper uses a version of this argument in his exegesis of Matthew 19, the story of the rich young ruler, in chapter nine of “Holy Poverty.”
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Harper, E. (2018). “The ryche man hatz more nede thanne the pore”: Economics and Dependence in Dives and Pauper . In: Bertolet, C., Epstein, R. (eds) Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71900-9_4
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